Pizzoccheri
The mountain dish of Valtellina. Buckwheat ribbons, potatoes, and savoy cabbage boiled in one pot, layered with Casera cheese, and drowned in hot garlic butter. Gooey, nutty, and built for a cold valley evening.
Pizzoccheri come from Valtellina, the Alpine valley north of Sondrio, close to the Swiss border. Buckwheat grows where wheat will not, and the dish combines it with the valley's other staples, potatoes, savoy cabbage, Valtellina Casera, and mountain butter. The town of Teglio takes the dish so seriously that it has its own Accademia del Pizzocchero.
Only a few ingredients
Potatoes
Cubed waxy potatoes, boiled in the pasta water ahead of everything else. Their starch builds the base of the dish.
Savoy Cabbage
Verza, cut into strips, added once the potatoes are nearly done.
Butter
Melted in a small pan until it turns hazelnut brown, the pour-over that crowns the dish.
generousGarlic
Thin slices, fried until golden. In the Sondrio area the garlic is swapped for sage.
Valtellina Casera
Valtellina Casera DOP, or Bitto, sliced thin and layered between pasta and vegetables so it melts slowly through.
the starGrana Padano
The final shower, over the hot butter.
Black Pepper
Freshly ground, over the top.
It is layered, not tossed.
Pizzoccheri are served in layers, pasta, cabbage, and potato, then sliced cheese, repeated, with the hot garlic butter poured over the top at the end. Stirring is not the tradition and dilutes the point: the cheese melts slowly through the layers and the butter carries the garlic. The cheese must be a young Alpine one, Casera, Bitto, or Fontina. An aged cheese turns grainy and loses the creaminess that is the whole dish.
Pizzoccheri
The grey-brown ribbons that give the dish its name.
Tagliatelle
A plain-flour ribbon if buckwheat isn't to hand.
Ready to cook?
These sources we trust. Each one makes it correctly.
Other sauces from the same region
Paccheri alla Vittorio
Paccheri in a silky tomato-butter sauce, made famous by the three-Michelin-star Da Vittorio in Bergamo. The tomatoes are cooked, blended, and sieved to velvet, then mounted with cold butter and Parmigiano.
Scarpinocc di Parre
A meatless stuffed pasta from Parre, in the Val Seriana above Bergamo, shaped like the cloth shoes the village shepherds wore. A spiced cheese-and-breadcrumb filling, dressed the only way it should be: butter and sage.
Maltagliati al Mascarpone
Irregular diamond scraps of pasta in a velvety mascarpone-and-egg sauce. A Lombard dish from the Po Valley, built from nothing wasted: five minutes, five ingredients, and a sauce that coats like nothing else.